Baroness Chakrabarti: I am grateful, but my hope is not dashed, not least because my noble friend is a force of nature, as he has demonstrated throughout his career with the integrity that others have referred to in the way that he has conducted himself over this particular issue in recent times. I need to put on the record for the Committee that he feels particularly strongly about the injustice faced by this cohort. I repeat: every argument we have aired earlier this evening becomes turbocharged in relation to these people, who were children when they were placed under this sentence. But for the moment, at least, I beg leave to withdraw.
Amendment 155 withdrawn.
Amendments 156 to 158 not moved.
Clause 48 agreed.
Amendment 159 to 166 not moved.

Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd: This is the first of three very short amendments to deal with the independence of the Parole Board. I do not think—and I hope—it is not disputed that the Parole Board is a judicial body and independent. If that is contested, we shall we be here for much longer today—so I hope it is not. I assume it is not going to be.
The second issue is that, if a body is judicial and independent, that independence must be recognised. There are three ways in which Clauses 53, 54 and 55 breach the independence position. First, in Amendment 169, the intention is to remove the power of the Secretary of State to predetermine the membership of the board. We have been very successful with judicial bodies in this country in allowing the judicial body itself, or its president, to determine who sits on panels. I can think of no good reason to change that—unless, of course, the previous Lord Chancellor had other plans for the kind of body he wanted.
The second is the business of sacking the chair. I use the word “sack” as I think it is a good, earthy word for what the previous Lord Chancellor wanted to do. We are the nation that established the idea that Kings could not sack judges, at the end of the Stuart period. We led the way forward, and virtually every  proper democracy has that principle. It would be absolutely astonishing if we regressed from that, away from the rule of law. This is a pointer to it: it is quite wrong and should be removed.
The third aspect is quite disingenuous: the desire to remove the provision in the Bill that the chairman of the board should not deal with individual parole cases. It is absolutely unintelligible. Why would you want to make the chairman of a judicial body incapable of dealing with cases? The reason for this was that it could then be claimed that, if the chair of the board was not dealing with cases, the chair did not have a judicial function, and that could therefore justify the sacking. This is both disingenuous and very bad in principle. The chair is turned, effectively, into a pay, rations and hiring functionary rather than a leader.
Secondly, if you are chairing a board dealing with parole, you want to lead it, to know what is going on in the cases, and you want views. You have to sit and do the cases. From my own experience, it is quite clear that, if you have a judicial leader who does not actually understand the business of the courts, the fellow members of the judiciary—in this case, the Parole Board—will have no respect whatever for them.
These are three short points; there is no more I can really say about them. They are all bad points in the Bill. This seeks simply to remove them.